Claim: Matt Lauer Full-On Raped Colleague; NBC Didn't Care

That door with a rape button just became an exhibit for the prosecution.

The claim is a bit complicated. It's complicated further by the fact that the author is Rowan Farrow, who has made a career trafficking in both meritorious and quite silly claims (such as that Ramirez woman's claim that after consulting with lawyers, she hazily remembered Brett Kavanaugh's penis).

What the story might be is that some consensual sex happened, and then some nonconsensual sex (or sex without clear and effective consent, anyway), and that Rowan Farrow is deliberately telling the story in such a way so as to avoid admission of consensual sex.

To increase clicks and sales. To pour more sugar into the cake.

That doesn't mean that nonconsensual sex is okay or anything. I just think he's doing his usual bullshit of tweaking a story to increase salability and impact.

And the fact that I don't trust him -- he's not a reporter, he's a grandstanding activist and would-be prosecutor always trying to make a shady case to increase his profile -- and that he seems to be relaying the story in an untrustworthy manner, gives me more doubts than I might otherwise have.

In Sochi, [former NBC employtee Brooke] Nevils was tasked with working with former "Today" co-anchor Meredith Vieira, who'd been brought back to the show to do Olympics coverage. In Nevils' account, one night over drinks with Vieira at the hotel bar where the NBC News team was staying, they ran into Lauer, who joined them. At the end of the night, Nevils, who'd had six shots of vodka, ended up going to Lauer's hotel room twice -- once to retrieve her press credential, which Lauer had taken as a joke, and the second time because he invited her back. Nevils, Farrow writes, "had no reason to suspect Lauer would be anything but friendly based on prior experience."

Once she was in his hotel room, Nevils alleges, Lauer -- who was wearing a T-shirt and boxers -- pushed her against the door and kissed her. He then pushed her onto the bed, "flipping her over, asking if she liked anal sex,” Farrow writes. “She said that she declined several times."

According to Nevils, she "was in the midst of telling him she wasn't interested again when he'‘just did it,'" Farrow writes. "Lauer, she said, didn't use lubricant. The encounter was excruciatingly painful. 'It hurt so bad. I remember thinking, Is this normal?’ She told me she stopped saying no, but wept silently into a pillow." Lauer then asked her if she liked it. She tells him yes. She claims that 'she bled for days," Farrow writes.

Nevils tells Farrow: "It was nonconsensual in the sense that I was too drunk to consent"” she says. "It was nonconsensual in that I said, multiple times, that I didn't want to have anal sex."

Lauer denies the allegation and says that they had consensual sex.

That said, to hell with Matt Lauer.

posted by Ace of Spades at 01:11 PM

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